Geotextiles are materials that are porous and relatively immune to the ravages of geological environment. Accordingly, geotextiles have found use by construction and soil engineers for preventing and/or repairing slips and landslides. Soil systems are inherently particulate systems that are governed by particulate mechanics as distinguished from liquid or solid mechanics. Stresses on soil give rise to an on-linear non-reversible sliding between particles. Soils are granular (sand. gravel, etc.) or cohesive (clays). Cohesive soil particles are plate or rod shaped. Since when under stress, soils tend to slide, it is often necessary to build retaining walls to prevent the sliding or slipping of the soil. Retaining structures are especially necessary when the building or construction is taking place on slopes or elevated areas. In the past retaining walls were constructed by excavating a section of the slope, and a retaining or gravity wall was formed and poured at the front border of the excavated section. After the wall hardened, the remaining opened excavated area was back filled. The back fills used in the past generally were relatively expensive substitute fill, such as sand or gravel, to assure ample drainage and to minimize sliding stresses on retaining walls.
More recently, geotextiles have been used to reinforce the fills by laying sheets of the geotextile in the excavated area to interrupt failure planes. Depending on the specific characteristics of the local soil, this technique enables the reuse of the excavated soil as the fill behind the wall. The geotextile porosity and surface characteristics provide some friction which minimizes "sliding" of the soil and enables drainage to further enhance the stability of the retaining wall.
A problem with this use of geotextiles has been that the geotextiles inherently tend to elongate or stretch notoriously under stress. This stretchable characteristic effectively cancels the capability of the geotextile sheets to retain the soil and thereby to effectively interrupt the failure planes. When the geotextile was fitted to the fill to provide a face, the stretchable characteristic of the geotextile caused the face of the geotextile to bulge.
Another problem encountered with use of the geotextiles as soil reinforcements in the past has been that there is no effective way to attach the geotextile sheets to the concrete retaining walls.
Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to minimize the stretching that occurs in geotextiles in actual use when under stress.
Another object of the invention is to attach the geotextile fill reinforcing material to the retaining wall.